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YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

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Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#541
post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "force of law" was largely on the side of the Rwandan genocide, so it's a slightly nonsensical example, although some of the broadcasts do satisfy the tight bound of speech that calls for "imminent lawless action" (which is the most recent criteria set by the US Supreme Court). Aside from that, both of those examples are examples where the harm comes from a specific action (or inaction), rather than the speech it…

Do you not see that there is a line drawn from speech to action, like in the situation surrounding the Rwandan genocide or in the case of antivaxxers leading to a resurgence in preventable disease? Like, are you trying to frame this in the sense of, "I can swing my fist toward your face all I want, but so long as I don't actually make contact it's okay"? I'm trying to understand how you're trying to thread the needle…

Speech can counter speech, and action can counter action. If you don't vaccinate your kids, CPS can take them away from you. If you want to write paranoid screeds about how vaccines and fluoridated water are a communist plot to block the pineal gland, that's up to you, buddy. Just know that if you have kids, we're keeping an eye on you, and if their shot cards aren't up to date or you have a doctor buddy forging them, we're gonna take away your kids and throw you in prison for a long, long time--just to make an example of you. This is what happens to tax protesters (like Wesley Snipes) and this is why tax protester conspiracy theories don't really get anywhere despite the absolute lack of any legal authority to stop people from disseminating them.

I mostly agree with you about Rwanda because openly calling for people to commit genocide does cross a threshold that justifies forceful reaction. My point there is that you're appealing to government, which is exactly who in Rwanda was organizing the genocide in the first place. But if you're imagining a UN peacekeeping force being deployed to Rwanda being the censors instead--sure, among many other things they should probably shut down the radio stations. I'm fine with that.

> Do you not see that there is a line drawn from speech to action

The problem is that this argument makes it too easy to misuse the instrument of censorship. You're calling for censorship that's both unnecessary and insufficient to solve the anti-vax problem, using a standard that could be just as easily abused to call for censorship that even you would disagree with.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comment voting has been the major solution thus far. Any scaled or NLP automated solution is just an arms race with bad actors.

And it's no solution.

I remember the days before Digg, Reddit, and Youtube voting. It's magnitudes better than that garbage.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't take your concern for creatives' ability to feed themselves seriously when you turn around and advocate for fully destroying the platform that is feeding them. Many full-time content creators on YouTube aren't big enough to make it on a smaller platform or on their own. I also don't think the "Machine" is necessary, but I do think it's better than having no global engine for content creation and community at…

The way it works is to have these companies hire, and pay for, and care for (see Facebook terminating counseling services, etc. for leaving content-moderation employees) employees to make the decisions to provide a platform that's safe and sane. That's it. That's literally it. That's just...it. You are ultimately correct, in that it will be of relatively higher cost. You are ultimately correct, in the sense that "any…

You speak with such confidence that YouTube is printing enough money to sustain such a massive additional cost but that's unlikely. Don't just take my word for it, the WSJ has reported on this matter [1] because Google doesn't release financial details for YouTube on its own.

You've done nothing but rattle off assertions about how YouTube just so profitable and won't shut down, how there's so much money in ad-supported video hosting, how somebody else can do it. These are fantastic claims, by which I mean they are rooted in fantasy.

I have no trouble believing that this represents an existential threat to YouTube. If Google massively shrinks or shuts down YouTube as a free and global content platform, it's not just their loss, it's ours as well.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-fo...

Relevant snippet from the WSJ article:

> The online-video unit posted revenue of about $4 billion in 2014, up from $3 billion a year earlier, according to two people familiar with its financials, as advertiser-friendly moves enticed some big brands to spend more. But while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year, it didn’t contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even,” according to a person with knowledge of the figure.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons I think anonymity on the Internet is a bad thing. Not that I am saying it should be banned, but it should not be the norm. Much of the toxicity simply would not happen, could be prosecuted, or could be filtered if a "real person" attribute was widely available.

Toxic comments can be just as common in non-anonymous forums and venues. Facebook produces a lot of toxicity, for example. Further consider; the Internet is much less anonymous then twenty years ago and that hasn't stopped the overall level of toxicity imo. The type of person who spontaneously makes toxic comments spontaneously will still make them when forced to use their real name (they'll just suffer more from it)…

...and people have been jerks since there were people, I am not implying that people being unpleasant was created by anonymous commenting.

However there would be quite a bit of backpressure against certain kinds of Internet toxicity if people were less anonymous.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#545

I would love to see a solution for this in the browser. If there was a tag, or some metadata attribute that indicated where each part of the document originally came from, you could just configure your browser to not render parts you don't trust. So in this case, YouTube could just flag the comment section as being provided by other users, and you can choose to block it if you don't trust other users to provide appro…

Other than the logo on top, the menu, the footer, and your own text in the search bar, what content on YouTube would not be covered by that tag?

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do this and so does Microsoft. Many companies have shared image finger-prints (hashes of images that can deal with resizing) and special people granted permission by the Dept of Justice to report such images. It's a small number of people, leading to at least one Microsoft employee filing a lawsuit for the PTSD he got having to verify and report illegal images. As far as these YouTube videos, Google does…

> It's others who go through and place them into a creepy context by grouping all of them together in playlists and via comment-chain links. Wanted to pull this out as (IMO) the most important part of your comment. There's nothing for the police to go after, because nothing illegal was happening here. The videos themselves were 100% benign, and while the comments were creepy and awful, they were also free speech.

So they cannot be censored, sure. But can they not be probable cause for a temporary tap on their internet connection? And if that reveals stuff like https connections to unpopular sites whose content can't be viewed publicly, Tor traffic, maybe torrent traffic, then that might be suspicious enough to bust the door while the connections are going on.

I'm against dragnet surveillance and all, but comments that are clearly predatory is a red enough flag that even I start to think it warranted to escalate step by step, and continue depending on what is found in each step.

Of course, this entirely depends on whether the comments are "oh look at that sweetie, probably has a nice puss" or just "oh look at that sweetie" interpreted the wrong way. I'm on the second page of HN comments and read three linked articles about it, and nobody mentioned what it's all about other than "predatory comments on videos involving minors".

Edit: As expected, Dutch news coverage is more explicit than prudish American. Example comment is: "$time $camel_emoji toe... Then again at $time". Another example: "Hi honey baby where r u from??". Last example is just "Love you" with a bunch of emojis like hearts and presents. Another website mentions the kids were called "godess" or "barbie". This sounds like it would be extraordinarily easy to just build a blacklist of words that trigger new comments to land in a moderation queue (processed either by youtube itself or by the video owner)... not sure what the difficulty is exactly. It seems harder to detect kids in videos than to build a blacklist of these comments, except that the former can be automated and the latter is ongoing moderation (probably too simple for Google: "if you can't automate it, it can never scale, so it can never be a solution").

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#547
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what? They haven't done anything illegal.

I just believe there should be no tolerance for pedophiles. If someone is behaving as a sexual predator online, you ought to suspect that's what they actually are.

> no tolerance for pedophiles.

Note that this is different from:

> sexual predator

The former is an ill person; the latter a criminal. Your call for no tolerance for anyone with a certain disease, no matter whether they know it's unacceptable and can cope with suppressing it, is a little too broad in my opinion.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#548
post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just how would you solve this if you were in their position?

Why not just prevent the use of timestamps on videos that contain children? Why not say "you cannot view this video if you are over 18" unless the watcher is specifically added to a list of allowed viewers? Why not require the watcher to enable a webcam & mic while watching videos containing children and create an algorithm to detect wanking? There are lots of solutions. relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2106/

> Why not require the watcher to enable a webcam & mic while watching videos containing children and create an algorithm to detect wanking?

Just how far are we willing to go to make our selves feel safer?! If you think that recording viewers is an acceptable and proportional solution to this issue, then your sicker than the creeps who get off videos of children.

I sincerely hope you're joking.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#549
post #157
post #9

Chris Ulmer, who runs the popular YouTube channel Special Books for Special Kids, said that comments were removed from his channel despite no evidence of unacceptable comments, and YouTube told him that if he turned comments back on, he risked his channel being deleted. [EDIT: Turns out, this is not actually the case. See child comments.] https://twitter.com/chrisulmer/status/1099366622329036801 "Last night I realize…

I might be in the minority here but I enjoy the low quality youtube comments. Most people dismiss them as cancer but the reality is a lot of people think in patterns that drive these comments. I would rather be in touch with and exposed to this rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It won’t ever go away, it will just be hidden.

The low quality YT comments often (by the law of large numbers) lead to some of the funniest quips/quotes/jokes/etc. that I've ever read.

Re: YouTube bans comments on all videos of children

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why this was flag killed. The Covington incident is a good example. A controversial event occurred and everyone from every 'side' was inflammatory and no one maintained civil standards. EDIT I guess flagging indicates part of the problem. Society is so busy screaming at ourselves that the only thing reasonable people think they can do is check out of controversial topics. EDIT Would any downvoters care to en…

HN has many great qualities, but some of the most important conversations we need to have are too emotional and inherently divisive to be connected to any kind of social currency system. there are times when identity itself is simply too much of a barrier.

I've read this a few times and I don't quite follow what you mean...
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